Scarcely had the dust settled following last week’s shooting at Apalachee High School, in Barrow County, Georgia, before the speculations started—most of it predictable. It’s the ubiquity of guns in America! It’s the lack of access to mental health care! Is the shooter trans, queer, or otherwise marginalized? Batten the hatches, kids, a massive political shitstorm is a-brewin’!
Little information is forthcoming about the shooter’s motivations. We know he’s fourteen years old,* that his parents purchased the firearm he used, and that, in an unusual maneuver, authorities have charged his parents as equally culpable for the catastrophe. The swirling accusations about overwhelming cultural trends might speak to whatever motivated the shooter, but for now, verifiable facts remain scarce.
This violence comes amid perhaps the most acrimonious election season America has seen, outdoing the previous most acrimonious election cycle, which was the last one… and the one before that. Apocalyptic rhetoric on both sides has become de rigeur in Presidential campaigns. America’s economy is supposedly thriving, but doesn’t feel productive for most Americans, since only the rich reap rewards.
As usual amid such apocalyptic circumstances, ordinary people try to reclaim the supposed lost grandeur of the past, while ignoring planning for the future. One Presidential candidate promises to “make America great again,” while the other yearns for the New Deal unitary order. Exactly when this greatness occurred remains vague, since the New Deal was as organizationally racist as the lily-white simplicity of Leave It To Beaver.
Meanwhile, hucksters remind every demographic that they can reclaim lost meaning… for cash on the barrelhead. “Men used to go to war,” laments the recurrent meme, “and now they [insert ordinary thing people do for fun].” Alpha male influencers like Andrew Tate and Alex Jones offer classes, nutritional supplements, and private guidance to become a dominant he-man. Dave Ramsey promises that Jeus wants to make you rich.
Since Andrew Tate is currently awaiting trial for sexual assault and human trafficking, we know what, in his mind, constitutes male strength. Anybody who’s worked the Sunday lunch rush at most restaurants knows that outspoken Christians can’t be trusted with money. Then, while men teach other men to abuse women, and Christians teach other Christians to hate workers, the rich think they can outspend the Grim Reaper.
Karl Marx believed that industrial capitalism would empower the working poor to develop class consciousness and overthrow their economic overlords. That maybe seemed reasonable amid the Dark Satanic Mills of pre-Victorian England, when labor actions frequently ascended into armed confrontations with literal liveried royal soldiers. To Marx, it probably seemed inevitable that what he called “alienation” would soon be universal.
It is, yes, but not as he envisioned. As the agrarian ideal recedes in memory, and factories, coal mines, and shopping malls seem inevitable, labor actions have stopped resisting the employer; workers instead defend their way of life, the system that keeps them permanently impoverished, and the bosses and billionaires who loot the masses for money. Because industrialism seems inevitable, the poor stan shamelessly for the rich.
This maybe explains trends we’ve all witnessed. It seems straightforward to me, that billionaires and resource hoarders keep the White working class impoverished, but White workers turn their rage on Black and Brown people and immigrants. Women certainly aren’t sending men to war or to the salt mines—most hyper-rich are men too—yet men pummel women, literally or figuratively, to reclaim their masculinity.
Barrow County, Georgia, is mostly White and relatively middle class. Like many similar regions, however, it’s seen its racial demographics become more diverse, and its average income stagnate, for the last quarter century. As usually happens, the economic powers use this changing population to chisel huge concessions, which means all economic gains, insofar as there are any, will trickle up.
The Apalachee High School shooter, like millions in his generation, watched the future he and his family were promised shrivel to almost nothing. Like millions of others, he looked directly at the entrenched powers making his old world look inevitable, and who now stand bathd in the economic carnage they wreaked upon the community. And like always, he blamed the poor for his plight.
Until Americans demonstrate enough imagination to realize that another world is possible, this violence will repeat itself in America’s schools, centers of commerce, and public spaces. These are the places where the world inside our minds has become small, circumscribed by our economic conditions. Mass gun removals, besides being impractical, won’t change the underlying mindset.
*Per my standard practice, I will not say the shooter's name, lest I contribute to his unearned notoriety.
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